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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22891942">Remember Me Love</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Suchsmallhands/pseuds/Suchsmallhands'>Suchsmallhands</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Angst, Death, Human Sacrifice, Inspired by Fanfiction, Inspired by Music, Isolation, M/M, Mythical Beings &amp; Creatures, Other, Paganism, Prayer, Supernatural Elements, on screen death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-02-25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-02-25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 11:28:14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>4,349</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22891942</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Suchsmallhands/pseuds/Suchsmallhands</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The gods demand a sacrifice of human life before the rain season. Remus has been chosen. </p><p> </p><p>  <em>Remus was dying. At the bottom of a hole in the forest, his hands tied to a stone. He wore ceremonial robes, just a long roll of white cloth wrapped around his waste that pooled around his legs. Other than that, his bare skin was exposed to the heat of the jungle. He was sweating. </em></p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Sirius Black/Remus Lupin</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>27</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Remember Me Love</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">


        <li>
            Inspired by

            <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/21397927">Strönd</a> by <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chromat1cs/pseuds/Chromat1cs">Chromat1cs</a>.
        </li>

    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This is a fic I wrote because I been thinking of it for a while but also it wouldn't have happened if I hadn't read "Strond" from the RS Fireside Tales fest. The author has not been revealed yet and still is anonymous so I can't exactly credit them but I will place the link to that story here in this note section. It's a really good one, I highly recommend it. I'm glad I stumbled on it. Sometimes you open a fic with totally low expectations and suddenly three hours has passed and then three days passes with it on your mind.</p><p>For record purposes I was also influenced around this time by the song "At The Door" by The Strokes.<br/>“33 GOD” by Bon Iver has some similar themes as well  </p><p>The piece Lark Ascending by Vaughn Williams is the inspiration for the birds.</p><p>my tumblr is @thisshipsailsitselff<br/>Thank you for being here and I hope you're doing well.<br/>READ WITH CAUTION, this is a major character death with said MCD occurring in detail on screen. This is unbetaed.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>remember me love when I'm reborn as the shrike to your sharp and glorious thorn</em>
</p><p> </p><p>Remus was dying.</p><p>At the bottom of a hole in the dense forest, his hands tied to a stone. He wore ceremonial robes, just a long roll of white cloth wrapped around his waste that pooled around his legs. Other than that, his bare skin was exposed to the heat of the jungle. He was sweating.</p><p>He tilted his head back to gaze overhead and breathed shallowly through the humidity. He was starting to feel weak and lightheaded, his thoughts disorganized. Three sides of the depression in the forest were harshly graded and direct, with rocky barren faces. One side of the hole had a tapering, although steep, descent to the bottom, so that one could climb out with extreme care.</p><p>The bottom of the pit was nothing wide or grand. It was less than the width of ten men laid down head to toe. Nestled here was the stone. Carved with the same holy symbol now tattooed in his own skin.</p><p>He looked overhead at the shock of brightness high above him that showed him what time of day it was. Just after noon. He wasn’t sure if he was glad or aggrieved that the sun had passed out of its zenith already today.</p><p>For thirty minutes everyday he got direct sunlight. In the beginning he would shuffle as far as he could to follow the light as it moved across the dead and decaying plant matter that had fallen into the pit. There were bones down here, left unnoticed by scavengers, and he did his best to leave them unnoticed as well.</p><p>In the first week he’d shaken with the strain to reach the light. He’d cried when he was fully covered by it. But in the last few days he’d leaned his body against the stone where his wrists were tied and waited for the sunlight to come warm them both. Either he or his body was too tired to keep reaching for the light.</p><p>He’d also been a dutiful son in his prayers, but that was in the beginning. Eventually, he was just saying them because he felt obligated. Because it was the way of things. Because this stone was highly sacred, not to be touched by any but the chosen, reserved for their conversations only. The ravine itself was purportedly holy ground, the truly desperate would sometimes pray at the edge of the cliff. As children, the irreverent and rebellious would test each other to see who might wander down inside. So, he prayed to the godstone. So much closer than he’d ever imagined being to it. But that was when he could speak clearly. Then it slipped his mind.</p><p>He did so now, his throat so completely dry that his prayer was just a whisper. Just a breath against the marking of the godstone.</p><p>“<em>Mother, deliver me from the thorn. Make me your body. Watch over my sisters and brothers. Guide me in your path. Though I bleed and perish, I turn not from your face and suffer your scorn for your grace. From you I come, to you return me.” </em></p><p>He blinked up at the mid-daylight, and the birds that flew over the mouth of the pit in the sky, fast as a dragonfly. He wondered if he could have fought harder and escaped this place.</p><p>He’d been chosen by the Elder. His face and his body illuminated in some holy vision. He’d been celebrated for this; he could remember the summoning to the Elder’s hut. He saw the memories of it in his mind, murky with delirium. They’d dressed him and placed him on a bed of flowers taken from the forest around their home and carried him through the village before a line of his people gathered to pay tribute to him and importantly, to the gods. Four people carried him on the bed of flowers, through the people, who as they passed would place an offering on his lap. He blinked at the sky and closed his eyes to his laborious breathing and remembered their kisses on his forehead and in his hair, their hands touching his arms and shoulders. So many prayers.</p><p>They had placed his bed of flowers and offerings on a table and he had been tattooed with the divine insignia. His arms held with honor and comfort and the needle drawn along his back. It bled and scarred.</p><p>His parents. He thought about their faces. They’d been grim but proud.</p><p>He hadn’t been able to think of anything to say to them. They had hardly said anything to him. His mother had grasped his head in her hands and kissed his forehead, between his eyes. He’d been as if underwater, lagging in his thoughts. Her fingers had pressed to his skull, holding his head in her hands with hard purpose. Her thumbs digging gently at his temples. And that was that.</p><p>He remembered the others from before him. When he laid down to stared up at the sky, he laid near to their bones. If he didn’t look for them, he could miss them, actually. Obscured by leaves and dirt and half buried, darkened by age. He remembered them, one every year. Carried past him when he was small, too small to participate in the offerings.</p><p>The rains must come. Some miles to the south, he had seen, the neglect of the land where the gods did not show their grace.</p><p>He blinked and his thoughts slipped. He became fixated on the feeling of his chest rising and falling with the hollow happy movement of his lungs. He wasn’t sweating as much. Maybe he should be, he was so hot. He tried to swallow but his throat caught on its own tough flesh. He couldn’t make it happen and he had nothing to swallow anyway.</p><p>He opened his eyes and saw the tops of the trees, far away. It was sunset. The leaves swayed in the breeze, shining with hot red light. He watched until they stopped burning red and darkened, as if in ash, to the coolness of dusk. He hadn’t felt moving air since he’d arrived here.</p><p>He closed his eyes and saw his mother’s face again. She was looking at him and he could see his hand reaching toward her, small and fat, to give her a pretty piece of grass. She was smiling at him and her big hand was closing around his to take the sprig. He opened his eyes up again and his chest collapsed with a hush.</p><p>Pure darkness layered around him and yielded overhead to a field of stars.</p><p>In the morning, half asleep, he watched a bird flutter into the pit. It started in the dawn light, high in the grass that swayed at the lip of the cave. Then dipping into the shade, it swooped acrobatically around the walls and landed on perches, calling out inquisitively. It would tweet. Talking to him. Then it would fly across the space over him and land a bit farther down on a bit of vine hanging on the walls. And again, until it landed on the stone whereby he was bound. It looked down at him and he up at it. It tweeted once or twice and then leaped into the air and took flight so quickly he lost track of it.</p><p>He turned his head and took sight of a man. He blinked and lost his breath, fatigued though it may be, forgetting at the sight. It was a man. He was knelt in the leaves, in the litter, looking at him.</p><p>Remus’ body vibrated with a shock that spread through him and crackled. His own eyes were wide, and his chapped lips parted. His fingers twitched.</p><p><em>“</em>Hey,” Remus croaked at him, in his language, not knowing what language this stranger may know. His voice thin with disuse. The man turned his fine head to the side and smiled. Like someone would smile at a stranger’s child who had caught her eye and stared innocently.</p><p>Remus stared back and over time, slow and lurching and rustling the dark brown and grey leaf clutter, he sat up. His body was slumped against the stone. He stared at the man, his eyes overly wide in the gaunt frame of his face, skin stretching. His ribs slid under the smooth pelt of his skin when he breathed. His spine was a ridge down his back. The tattoo a dark brand in the rising dawn shade where he slouched.</p><p>He watched the man and leaned his head against the rock.</p><p>“Hey.” He rasped, just a whisper, again. He blinked and watched the man tilt his head and gaze not unkindly at him.</p><p>At this, he was overcome for some time with a horrible gratitude. Gratefulness flushed his body so that his throat closed with a lump, and he panted more deeply. He would have said thank you to the stranger. He would have thanked him for watching him, for looking at him. He would have thanked him for his gaze. He didn’t need to though. He knew by the silver of his eyes that he already knew the thanks he was given.</p><p>Remus thought he’d never seen a more beautiful creature. His fingers twitched when he looked at the black hair, silken like the slick black of fresh deer’s blood. He was naked, healthy with soft muscle and fat, lips full with supple blood.</p><p>Remus had hardly rested through the night, and though he tried his eyes weighed heavily and blinked slowly until he knew sleep was near. With a glance he knew his companion was still watching and he fell asleep, blinking once more with a last determination to glimpse him.</p><p>When he woke, his face red and mottled with the coarse body of the stone, he opened his eyes to the empty place where his man had been before.</p><p>The cool morning hours in the shade of the rock walls passed with his thoughts moving lethargically in and out of his mind. The pain of thirst was gone, and he no longer sweat. He was too tired to move his position for a more comfortable one but would close his eyes for long periods of time and listen to the sounds of the trees and the animals above.</p><p>Sometimes he would open his eyes to see the empty place where the man had been before. He stared at the leaves as if to see the depression he’d left in the plant matter, a print in the detritus of the figure of a friend.</p><p>His temple leaned against the stone and his body slumped against it and he drifted back into sleep, his thoughts wandered back up the ravine as if he had stood and began to clamber up the slope. He saw the path back through the trees. He saw himself in the open fields where they grew food, saw his hands hauling up great baskets and sacks of food to carry on his back as a woman walked in front of him and sheered the crops of their goods. He smiled at her when she looked over her shoulder to smile sweetly at him, young and beautiful and glowing just so with sweat. Then her face was old and wizened and she was turning around to yank on his burden and adjust it so that he was carrying it properly, <em>you will break your back like that, boy, you’ll need that. </em>He saw the tall stalks of the reeds that grow near the river, blurring past him and whipping at his bare chest as he raced through them, the tips swaying just over his head. He was screaming and reaching out with his hands to protect his face from the snap of the reeds as he chased James. He was hearing the panting of the dog as she raced along behind them. He was kneeling beside a fire next to his father and following his weathered, great hand as it pointed to the moon and told him the story of the spirit who created it. He saw the stick his father held in his hand, drawing a line in the dirt to illustrate the story. He saw the ghost of his own breath extending into the air in front of him as he stared up at the moon, fading in the cold winter night air. He saw the harvest season, the people kneeling on great hides and sifting rice drying in the sunlight, the wrinkled hands of old women as they wove and bound together the supports of houses and molded clay bowls. He saw his hand brushing a lock of hair away from a woman’s bold face, her smiling eyes lowering. He saw himself standing by his mother’s side, carrying her things. He was back in the village at night, standing alone as his people gathered around the fire in the center and prayed in unison, holding hands and echoing each other. He could see the sparks flying into the dark from the fire. He turned what seemed so slowly, and took a step toward the forest.</p><p>He walked in and through the trees in the dark of night, up the hill toward the mountain, until he arrived at the pit. He stepped out of the bush and into sudden daylight, pausing a few feet from the edge of the hole. The lush and gentle grass lolled contentedly and waved in the sunlight, gleaming with the full noon heat of day. A grasshopper leapt nearby and a wasp buzzed past. He looked over his shoulder to the forest, dappled with happy spots of light through the shade of the trees. It was surreal and morbid in its emptiness. Just the leaves and the trunks of trees, no one to be seen beneath. He faced the pit and stepped forward until his toes lingered at the edge.</p><p>Looking into the yawning grave, he could see at the bottom a body. It curled as if asleep, dressed in the white cloth around the waist, its legs extending from beneath the skirt. Laid beside the stone. He lifted his head and stared around him as the forest decomposed. The sun expanded slightly as if reaching great arms out to cover the blue of the sky. The tree leaves became brown and crinkled and disappeared, the grass shrinking and browning and crumbling as dust. The body of the land draining until no water remained in any of its cells.</p><p>He lifted his hand in surreal and slow time and struggled to draw breath, the air refusing to enter his lungs, looking at his open palm. A drop of water landed in his hand and he looked up once more to draw breath as the grass grew and the leaves grew on the branches of the trees, first shriveled and brown until they filled with water and became green.</p><p>He woke to himself in the pit from the dream. He was hot, the sun had progressed to its zenith and he was covered in its light again. Still upright as he’d fallen asleep He checked and saw the man’s place empty.</p><p>He looked up and suddenly began to cry. He opened his mouth and cried out shortly, gasping and then choking on it. Then he was screaming. He screamed long and loud, his head tilted back. He grabbed at the rope tied to the stone and scraped at it where it clung to the rock, chipping his nail ends. He screamed more. His body curled forward and his face pressed against the stone, his screams becoming sobs that heaved from his stomach. He cried with his open mouth pressed close to the burning stone, everything was so hot.</p><p>His heaving and braying sobs soon became long groans like a beast trapped in teeth. His moaning stood out in the quiet of the middle day, the sound of it had silenced the insects and birds in the area.</p><p>He couldn’t produce tears.</p><p>He lay against the rock until the sun had passed from him. His body produced its wounded and quiet whimpers of its own accord for some time until it was quiet, too.</p><p>Then he heard footsteps behind him. He rolled his head against the rock and looked over his shoulder to see the man. His grey eyes looked down on him warmly. He blinked deliriously at him, unable to speak at him.</p><p>He leaned down with an extended hand toward his crumbling form, holding his gaze. Then Remus felt his hand lay flat against his back. The insignia in his skin seared and his eyes widened in pain, locked with the grey.</p><p>
  <em>Sirius</em>
</p><p>He was filled with the heat from the skin of his back where Sirius’ palm met him. Like fire made liquid gold, thick like honey, it spread through him from the hand and into his chest. The heat filled his stomach, it seeped between the rungs of his ribs, it wet his throat and mouth, it flowed down his limbs until it reached his fingers and feet, flowing between the joints of his knees.</p><p>Suddenly he lifted from his body so that he was looking down. He looked at Sirius, who in a blink morphed to a bird and twisted into the sky. Remus without a thought followed him. His body floated naturally into air, his wings folding and shaping the space beneath. He followed in Sirius’ flight path, which twisted and turned with no purpose but to movement.</p><p>His body flew without his input. Soaring high until the forest was but a distant map, a quilt. He called to Sirius at the top of his voice, which warbled and wavered like a stream. Sirius turned and flew in cutting spirals around him, shaping random patterns which Remus copied and followed mindlessly. He sang and sang. Sirius called back and beckoned him until they were rising lazily and meanderingly. He twittered and tweeted, Sirius replying intermittently. Sometimes he’d dive and flutter acrobatically toward the trees and Remus would follow as if in orbit. He understood the story of the moon and the stars, and had no other end but to streak and follow in Sirius’ path. Then the dark flush of Sirius’ feathers would spin around him and brush him with his talons and wingtips, leading him back higher than before.</p><p>The world was turning into dusk around them with the setting of the sun and his singing quieted while following every turn of flight Sirius made. Sirius vocalized to him once before he began leading them to toward where the glow of the bleeding sun beat and glowed. He followed and watched as the forest below them rapidly blended into the dry and tanned desert as they traversed. Sirius led them in chase through the sparse desert brush. He carved paths that just skimmed the sand and leapt to and from the spines of cacti. Where he landed Remus landed and departed. Sirius caught a pale, dust collared lizard, pinning it in a flurry of feathers and sand. He passed its corpse from his own beak to Remus’, who took it in his beak and took flight.</p><p>Sirius placed them at a tall and gnarled bush which reached from the ground with sharp and clawed thorns, cluttered with rough and dark leaves. Sirius hopped down the branch they perched upon so that one of the thorns extended between them. Remus mounted the lizard between them, spearing its body on the thorn.</p><p>The blood of the sun dissipated in the sky until indigo crowned the earth. Speckles of stars formed and multiplied, hosting heaven with the moon’s lovers.</p><p>Sirius took flight from their place and Remus followed his form in faith across the earth, arching in curves and loving patterns that Sirius laid out for them, extending their flight.</p><p>The desert molded into forest, wetting with life giving moisture and germinating with matter. Over the trees and in the distance, black rainclouds gathered to deliver the water again. Heavy and warning. Sirius tweeted once and dived from the air into the great pit where his body lay. Remus saw himself laying in a fetal curve as if still in his mother’s womb.</p><p>His hands bound almost lovingly by the chords to the stone, his umbilical cord, connecting him to his mother. Sirius landed on the stone. Remus landed beside him. He looked to him, to which Sirius dipped his head forward until his beak touched his tiny and fragile skull.</p><p>Then he was back in his body. He gasped, panting in the night air. It was dark but the darkness was sweet. He rolled onto his back and his head faced to his side. Sirius sat by him, his hands in his lap, his gaze on him.</p><p>Remus’ chest compressed with a hush and faltered, his heart twinging failingly in his chest, before he could draw another breath, safe and welcomed in the sight of him.</p><p>Sirius didn’t forsake him from his gaze until he fell asleep. His body molded to the line of the earth, his awareness traced the leaves which touched his back and his arms where they lay. His mind felt the earth push back against him when he pushed against it with the animal, infantile pulse of his breathing. He felt the soil supporting his head, the ants crawling over the cracking skin of his arms and the crease of his elbows. The land a great hand which cradled him as a mother, his infant form. He felt the earth breathing overhead, wind pushing at the leaves which hummed in the cool night. Each tree trunk an artery which connected the lung roots. Each branch which tapered into a twig, each a capillary. Each leaf a cell to gulp air. The earth sighed.</p><p>Sirius gazed at him.</p><p>He woke to wetness. He blinked his eyes and lifted his head shakily to see his body covered in drips of water. He looked to his side where Sirius sat. The soil clung to his cheek, damp. He could smell the petrichor; dead leaves and dirt, ripe with the scent of rain. He looked up to the trees which bent with the rain wind, carrying with it the scent of the storm. He took his time in raising himself. He could only move in slow and halting progress. The rain picked up and the clouds released their carry. The sound of it a crescendo in the cool and welcoming forest. Remus tried to look up but had to blink his eyes shut in the onslaught, fat and hard drops of water pelting his face and shoulders. His white skirt scorned with black soil and plastered to his legs. He panted and gasped at the feeling of rain, dripping into his mouth and making his tongue sear and tingle, his jaw hurt.</p><p>He knew Sirius was by his side, settled right next to him. As if they were knelt to pray at the rock as an altar. Remus kept his face tilted to the rain. His ears deafened by the roar of the rain. His bloody lips wetted.</p><p>The water followed like a small waterfall down the steps of the ravine. A river of soiled water tumbled down its rapids, brown with the sludge of the earth. It created a pool in his grave.</p><p>His heartbeat was pounding. He turned to seek Sirius but he was gone.</p><p>He panted and trembled and his chest burned and tightened as if to burst with the rabbit fast pace of his heart.</p><p>In more than a week he had lain in this place, time had changed face to seem as a month. A year passing in uneven strokes of lightspeed and glacier shifts.</p><p>It only took but a moment for the water to churn up to his chest. He pulled on the ropes but it was weak even in spirit. His mind was blank with the terror. He couldn’t even feel the horror, just his pulse racing on.</p><p>The water lapped at his jaw and his head tilted back to avoid the rising tide. The panic of his body and his blood gave him need of oxygen all the more and he sucked air in lung fulls of fear. The sound of the thousand impacts of droplets around him cut in and out until his ears filled with water and quieted the roar to a hum.</p><p>The brown water lapped at the corners of his eyes and began spilling into his mouth and he gulped and gasped air between choking water.</p><p>He strained his body for the surface until it overcame him. He panicked and could not draw breath for some time, his eyes watching the dark surface of the water as it retreated from him, bits of plants and earth swirling in the murk before him. His lungs spasmed horribly to draw breath. Eventually they yielded and he was still, losing the sense of his body, the dim light from the surface already faded to leave him in darkness.</p><p>He felt hands. They wrapped around his head to cradle his face, fingers soft in his waterlogged hair, thumbs pressed against his temple. He knew these were Sirius’ hands that held his head. His eyes were open but saw nothing in the dark water.</p><p>He felt the press of Sirius’ forehead against his. The horrible terror then left him.</p><p>His body became soft and his muscles let go. He opened his lips and water slowly entered his stomach and lungs. His lungs twitching as if to move the water as air.</p><p>He felt Sirius’ nose against his. His thumbs stroked his skin.</p><p>
  <em>Mother deliver me from the thorn. From you I come, to you return me</em>
  <em>.</em>
</p><p>A great voice spoke then, unmeasured in dimension and without boundary, eclipsing his soul and self with its happening. Sirius named him.</p><p>As if the ropes dissolved in the flood, his body drifted freely, and his mind hushed in peace.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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